I posted some video of our family vacation to Montenegro on YouTube this week, and believe it or not have gotten 88 views of the first one in the series so far (it drops off as you get down the end of the seven– if you want to check them out, the easiest way is through my FaceBook page).  The six-year-old nation, at the southern tip of what used to be Yugoslavia, just above Albania, is a spectacular country.  Think Norwegian Fjords flowing into Caribbean waters, with  14th century walled in towns, monasteries, and forts sprinkled in liberally.  It was another off-the-grid trip for the family (guaranteeing extra years of therapy for my kids), one of many we have taken each summer. Yet, the Balkans still seem to be very, how do you say, “Balkanized– even in the year of 2009.  Croatia is just to the north, but no Croatians would ever go the Montenegro, nor would the locals that we talked to ever venture up to Croatia– the dislike is just still too intense for any cross-border trips.  Nor would they go south to Albania (one university student we hired to tour us around the beautiful Skadar Lake that is shared with Albania told us that while is not a racist, they really don’t like Albanians).  In... 

I have been hearing a lot about Twitter in the damage control industry of late, but I have been struggling to figure out how exactly to deploy Twitter for  purposes of crisis communications.  I can certainly envision monitoring discussion for a consumer brand, say Verizon Wireless, and reaching out directly to individuals who have had bad experiences that they are tweeting about.  But I still don’t understand how to identify more narrow audiences that aren’t so obvious, but who are important for what I do for clients. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is never dull despite its title, reports on a survey of Twitter users by the Nelson Company that teens don’t tweet.  As the parent of teenagers, I already sort of knew this, but it’s probably a good lesson for people in my business to understand who uses Twitter, and who doesn’t.  My favorite analysis in the article is from a lecturer at Wisconsin University, Tanya Joosten, following a survey of her own students:  “Twitter is definitely about having a broadcast medium to the general population,” she said. “I don’t think that’s Facebook. And I don’t think people under the age of 25 have any interest in broadcasting beyond their... 

The health care debate that seems to be taking up all of the oxygen in the national political room in these dog days of August is presenting a very difficult test for the Obama White House.  The New York Times has a scary article today about the genesis of one of the louder lines of attack, the “Death Panel” provisions that don’t actually exist in any of the legislation.  But as my partner Stan Collender is quick to remind me, the debate really isn’t about health care reform.  It’s about the efforts of the Republican opposition, which lacks political clout in either the House or Senate, to score a major political victory by helping to defeat the major Obama initiative.  Whether that is a good move for the Republicans, and whether their attacks have gone too far, will only be clear with time.  But how should the White House respond?  Fighting back quickly and hard is the right move in my opinion, but there isn’t much to stand behind without a clear legislative proposal yet on the table.  It may be the best that they can do right now, given that the legislative negotiations still need to germinate before we will know whether reform stands a chance of passing.  But it’s clearly not... 

I know I seem too fond of my favorite columnist, Steve Perlstein of the Washington Post, but his column yesterday on the health care is worth reading.  He begins a real health care debate with real solutions, rather than the rhetorical blather we have been hearing.  Read More →

Here’s the biggest drawback to not having a recognized national party leader as your chief spokesperson– the fractious Republican front-runners with different constituencies and interests will bury the Republican party’s narrow ability to play this nomination the right way.  Already, conservative groups and leaders– including de facto spokesman Rush Limbaugh– have made their dislike for Judge Sotomayer clear. Here’s their problem– underestimate the extreme pride that the entire Hispanic community feels towards their first Supreme Court nominee and you will lose them for your natural lifetimes. “Caller after caller to a radio show popular in Central Florida’s booming Puerto Rican community gushed Tuesday over President Barack Obama’s decision to nominate one of their own to the nation’s highest court,” McClatchy’s Beth Reinhard and Lesley Clark report. “Even the Republicans.” (Quote courtesy of ABC’s The Note). This is not Clarence Thomas, who the political leaders of the black community saw not as one of their own but as an impostor.  If a bunch of older white Republican Senators take off after Sotomayer during the confirmation hearings, or make any...